I like to think that I have one of those cooler heads they always talk about (maybe it’s just because not much work gets done in there) but I’m beginning to be concerned at the direction this country is taking.
It started with the wussification of coffee. No longer is it the great American beverage that fueled cattle drives and kept soldiers alert through the dark hours of their watch. Thanks to Starbucks, Caribou and all their frilly little friends, coffee has been yuppified beyond recognition. For one thing, you can’t even get a regular cup, you have to start with tall and go from there to sizes that don’t even exist in English. And then you can’t fill the cup with actual coffee without the barista (huh, she’s barely 18 and can’t make change but she’s a barista?) letting you know through the same facial expression she uses when she hears the word “curfew” that you are hopelessly not cool and old. You’re supposed to order a frappucino or some sort of candy beverage with five words in the name. I mean, a venti white chocolate mocha cappuccino has more sugar, more syllables and almost as much solid matter as two pieces of tiramisu, with less coffee flavor. So if you learned to love coffee by waking up at zero-dark-thirty only two hours after you came in off patrol, and you want it black and hot even if it is July, there aren’t a lot of places where you’re welcome anymore.
The next thing I noticed was that our young people can no longer discern the differences in our political parties. Just look: the voice of the Young Republicans is a woman who loves burlesque shows, tweets her bra size, and supports tolerance for gay marriage, while the kid credited for the Internet –based social networking that got Obama elected is a graduate of Harvard Business School with solid venture capital creds. C’mon, you two, how’d you wander into the wrong party? Can’t you tell the difference between an elephant and a donkey? Well, it is getting harder. With the substitution of a few key words like “renewable energy” for “oil company,” the rhetoric is a lot the same. The Democrats have their own war now, and bought a chunk of General Motors. The Republicans are screaming about the deficit and proposing taxes. They have become each other. In fact, we really have a one-party system with two distinct camps, just like most church denominations.
And now we’re playing baseball in the winter. Games are postponed because of snow, and the talking heads are buzzing about what will happen if the Angels or Dodgers have to play in 40-degree weather. And the Twins have abandoned the Dome for a new outdoor park.
Now that I’ve spelled it out, can you see it? Our most sacred institutions – coffee, politics and baseball – have fallen victim to the creeping liberalization of our age. It’s time to swallow our pride and admit what we have denied for too long: Al Gore is right. It’s all due to global warming.
In retrospect, the progression is obvious. Once women started demanding we wear deodorant, our over-use of spray cans caused a hole in the ozone layer which allowed solar radiation to begin warming our climate. No, I don’t know why, since the hole is over the South Pole, Antarctica didn’t melt first but just shut up. So then, it got maybe two degrees warmer in the last 20 years except for the places where it got colder, like Gore’s hometown, and more parts of the world turned to desert except where we now have green grass seven months of the year instead of brown crunchy lawns in August. All this global warming led to the collapse of the “stuff we like when it’s cold” industry, like hot chocolate (except at Starbucks where you can get more kinds of chocolate than actual coffee) and studded snow tires. All those hot-chocolate factory workers who were suddenly un-employed could no longer make the payments on the million-dollar homes in Florida they bought as investments, so the government gave a bunch of money to some banks, bought into the car business and is going to get the money back by paying for health care for everyone. If you follow the obvious trends, this all can only lead to . . . hrmm, Al Sharpton freaking out about Rush Limbaugh owning an NFL team? No, that’s too weird, even for America.
Fortunately, there is someone in charge of this funny farm, and Psalm 2 says He’s just watching us and laughing. He’s going to make something good out of this mess, and I for one think it’s going to be kind of fun to watch.
